22 February, 2017

Foreign-funded NGOs in Ecuador: Trojan Horse for intervention?

Ecuador
has come under fire for scrutinizing non-profits like Accion
Ecologica, many of whom get millions from Europe and North America.

Part
3 - Donor Nations: Generous or Greedy?

The trend
that prompted Ecuador's law was not without precedent.

Through
the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, and
the linked but publicly independent National Endowment for Democracy,
known as NED, the United States pumped over US$100 million into
Venezuela to create 300 new organizations credited with contributing
to the coup d’etat against Hugo Chavez in 2002. In a similar move,
USAID admitted that it tried to provoke a “Cuban Spring” by
setting up Zunzuneo, a kind of Cuban Twitter, to circulate calls to
protest.

The most
common nonprofits close to foreign governments and private interests
are those that stand tallest against their states. In Ecuador, that
tends to be groups that work closely with Indigenous communities,
with those protecting their right to their land and with those
defending women and the environment. Funding by private foundations
and corporations, while more widespread, is far less transparent and
tougher to quantify. Big names like the Ford Foundation and Open
Society, however, are well known for injecting funds into NGOs in the
global south to advance specific political visions.

But the
United States isn’t the only country to have funneled funds to
Ecuador through NGOs.

Official
numbers from Ecuador's Chief Administrative Office of International
Cooperation, or SETECI, show that since Correa assumed office in 2007
until 2015, foreign NGOs have managed over US$800 million from
abroad. Top givers include the U.K. and Spain, followed by several
European states.

No one,
however, beats the United States. In that same period, the U.S. sent
over twice the amount of money of the next-highest donor, with a
total of over US$282 million and 780 projects, or 35 percent of all
funding.

Of those
funds, which only count NGOs based abroad that invested in local or
regional projects, 13 went to projects in the Amazon led by
non-profits like Care International, the Wildlife Conservation
Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and the Mitsubishi Corporation Foundation for the
Americas. Projects based in Morona Santiago, the province where the
anti-mining protests that led to the death of police office broke
out, brought in over US$1 million from the U.S. since 2007.

The flow of
funds is indicative of a broader attitude between receiver and giver,
who “take advantage of the assumption that they have a perfect
democracy, which is completely false – there’s a paternalistic
attitude that must be regulated,” said Fernando Casado,
research fellow at the National Institute for Higher Studies on
public administration in Ecuador and Venezuela. Conversely, a flow in
the opposite direction would immediately raise suspicion from
developed countries, he added.

Yet money
itself doesn’t tell the full tale: the funds are tied directly to
foreign policy objectives, Casado told teleSUR. “The powers of
the North have changed strategy.”

Each state
has its own way. Germany, which has had 151 NGO projects in Ecuador
since 2007, is known for meddling in affairs of developing countries
through its Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development, or BMZ. When SETECI found that three-quarters of its
funds went toward stopping another mining project in the Amazon's
Yasuni region last March, it kicked the German agency out of Ecuador.

The
United States has several agencies do its work, the most prominent
being USAID, NED — funded through money allocated to USAID by
Congress — and the Broadcast Board of Governors. The stated
missions: to promote development, democracy creation and a free
press, respectively, while strictly adhering to U.S. foreign policy
priorities.

“We
should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said former
head of NED Carl Gershman on CIA missions to the New York Times in
1986. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the
world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 60s,
and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the
capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created.”